Solaris Rising (22 page)

No, we’re earlier than that now. Hurtling backwards the whole time.

This was when Brad was giving his introductory lecture to the new recruits. These were all brilliant minds, but all of them ignorant of the business of time travel. The whole discipline was classified. The basic
equations
were classified. The government would hardly spend so many billions on a project and leave it flapping vulnerable in the public breeze. So the students sit expectantly. Notkin is there, looking much younger and plumper and with eager eyes; all twelve of them have eager eyes.

Bradley says: “Shall I tell you the problem with Time Travel?”

And they listen.

“You need to stop thinking of it as
travel
,” says Bradley. “It’s not like wandering around a landscape. When you put an object from our time into another time frame, it’s like bringing matter and anti-matter together. It’s actually very much like that; the matter of your probe” (he holds up the thumb-sized plasmetal object) “is of a radically temporally distinct sort to the matter of your surrounding environment – the air, the ground on which it finds itself, the water in the atmosphere. They mutually annihilate and release energy. Boom!”

The students are wide-eyed and attentive.

“That would be bad news for the chrononaut,” says Brad, walking round to the front of the desk and leaning himself, rakishly, up against it. He is half-distracted – or no, a third-distracted, no more – by the eyes of that plump graduate student there, in the front row. Very striking. Attractive. He was not a man with a wide experience of women, but something about her gaze appealed to him. “Our chrononaut would step out of the door of his time machine into the world of 1850 and,
boom
! In fact he wouldn’t even get the chance to open the door. The material out of which his time capsule was made would react as soon as it appeared. Boom! How big a boom?”

So he calls up the white board, and as a group they go through the numbers, with Brad leading them, to show how big a boom. And it is big. It’s high explosive big. And as they do this, as he nudges their naïf misunderstandings in the right direction, and pushes the correct equations through the mass of variables, Brad thinks:
she’s bright as well as pretty
. He starts to daydream, idly, about whether this young new-PhD might be interested in –

“So how do we solve it, professor?” asks one of the other students.

Snap out of it, Brad! “That’s what
you
are all here to work on,” he booms. “We know what we need to do. We need to
shield
the probe,” and he holds up the probe again, “so that, once it’s inserted in the previous time slot it lasts longer than a microsecond. And then we need to develop the means of temporally polarising its matter. Given a long enough period – thirty seconds should do it – we ought, theoretically, be able to align the matter of the probe with the local grain of time travel. And once we’ve done that it can slot into the new environment
non
-explosively. Once we’ve cracked that problem… then actual, real time travel becomes a possibility.”

He grins; they grin. The world is all before them.

“One problem,” he tells them, “is in finding places to test our probe. You see, the early probes are likely to fail; we have to factor that in. And
when
they fail they’re going to go big boom-boom.” He simpers, and pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “The past is a different country, and we don’t want to go dropping random dynamite bombs on it hither and yon.”

“Because of the sanctity of the time lines, professor?” asks one of the students.

“Because of the risk of killing people. But there’s a way to avoid that danger.”

What way?

No, we’re slinking back further and further.

One

The 1940s. This is the moment of Hiroshima. What better place to hide an exploding device from the future than
inside a nuclear blast
? The time-locals are hardly going to notice it there, are they? Drop it at that place, at precisely that time. You’ll recover metrics that let you know how well the shielding is holding up, how long it would have lasted for – and then, bang: vaporised. No chance of futuristic technology falling into 1940s hands. No chance of being noticed. No grandfather paradox. Oh it’s an
ideal
solution.

One of the first things the team learn is that their theory is wrong. The device explodes not with high-explosive force, but with a more concentrated and devastating power. But it’s still small beer compared with the force of ten thousand suns that the atomic bombs unleash.

They test, and probe. They drop their devices into Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were 477 nuclear tests in the period from 1945-1970, and they can camouflage their work inside any one of them. Each time they inch a little closer to perfecting the technology, drawing out the power of the shielding, giving more time for the polarisation to take effect.

Eventually, of course, they’re going to run out of nuclear explosions in which to hide their experiments. But by then they’ll have perfected the technology. By then. And if they have not, then they’ll have to find
other
historical explosions. That asteroid strike in Siberia in 1908 – you know the one. That’s always a fall-back.

It’ll be a long time before Notkin realises that the delta fold-up function that Professor Bradley included in his equations in fact follows an exponential rather than a sequential logic. Before she realises that the brown-paper-and-vinegar science of the Manhattan project, stuck with 1940s technology and assumptions, was simply not in the position to develop a working nuclear device. That the exponential factor in the equations, multiplied by the length of time through which the device travels, rubbing up a potent form of energetic friction, will produce an explosion of… precisely A-bomb dimensions. And that the later tests, with more sophisticated shields, would yield precisely the larger megatonnage of the test explosions into which they were dropped. That, in fact…

Missed it. Brad has shot backwards. He’s now earlier than Hiroshima, and is getting more
before
by the minute.

Frankly, he’s lost control. His grasp of the math has been wrong from an early stage, and he’s massively overestimated the amount of energy he needs to place this much larger device back to the right time. (He was thinking the 1970s). There’s an inverse scale on increasing math; but a straightforward exponential on the amount of energy you accumulate as you –

There he goes

Gone.

Before
gone.

Zero

The deeper in time you sink, the more temporal static you build up. On the other hand, imagine an asteroid capable of causing mass extinction. That would have to be a
whopper
. But there never was such a large irregular polygon of ice and rock falling out of the highest high. You don’t believe me? Fair enough. I tell you how we can solve it: go back there and see for ourselves. Imagine the time traveller, his capsule popping out and crashing into the foliage. It lands on its back, tumbles on its top, rolls on its back, and the chrononaut can see out through his porthole. He wipes the condensation away with his arm. There are weird contortions of green and black, and he recognises them straight away for foliage. He can see two things. Past the leaves, out in the wetland a grazing diplodocus raises its head, its long neck straightening upwards like a pointing arm. The other, of course, is the number seventeen on his inner display turning, second by second, into sixteen, and so into fifteen, and – well, I daresay you know how to count backwards just as well as you know how to count forwards.

THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF CHE GUEVARA

LAVIE TIDHAR

Lavie Tidhar is the author of steampunk novels
The Bookman
,
Camera Obscura
and
The Great Game
, weird-lit novel
Osama
, linked story collection
HebrewPunk
, several novellas and many, many more short stories. During a recent two month visit to Jakarta, Lavie was dragged to watch
The Hands of Che Guevara
, a documentary film by Dutch director Peter de Kock. The film’s theme gelled with a couple of ideas he had been mulling over for a while and this story emerged as a result.

Part One: Vallegrande

“This morning we are about 99% sure that ‘Che’ Guevara is dead.”

– Walt W. Rostow to Lyndon Johnson,

October 11, 1967

1

On the night of October 10, 1967, the residents of Vallegrande woke up uneasily with their mouths watering and the smell of pork crackling wafting through the air. It was a rare delicacy in the small Bolivian town, and children and adults as one went out into the quiet street to look for the source of the smell.

It is a small, pretty colonial town, Vallegrande, about 125 kilometres away from Santa Cruz. It has a church and a town square, an airstrip and a bakery and a school.

And the smell was coming out of the bakery.

It had been an exciting day in the life of Vallegrande. Only on October 9, just one day before, a military helicopter had landed on the small strip and the lifeless body of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was brought out. He had been shot nine times.

The following day two doctors, Moisés Abraham Baptista and José Martínez Cazo, performed the autopsy on the corpse and pronounced Che Guevara dead at the Hospital Knights of Malta, Vallegrande.

There were soldiers outside the bakery, the citizens noticed as they approached, with the smell of cooked meat filling their nostrils.

“Don’t come near!”

The soldiers looked agitated.

“Why not?”

“Military operation in progress.”

You didn’t question the military, and so the parents and their disappointed children returned home, and to bed, where they lay for a long time without sleeping, still tantalised by the smell.

Inside the bakery the wood was burning in the oven and the flames licked the naked body of Che Guevara. The smell of roasting human flesh and the smell of pork crackling are surprisingly similar, and impact in the same fashion on the human olfactory sense.

But you cannot cremate a man in a bakery oven, as the soldiers found out, and finally they pulled out the corpse (one of them had thrown up by the sink, just missing it) and drove the cooling body to the airstrip, where it was buried.

If they noticed the corpse was missing both hands, they never said so.

2

The doctor did not see himself as old, at 56, but he
was
frightened. While his one-time colleague, Klaus Barbie, now known as Klaus Altmann and with an Argentinean rather than German identity, had been helping the CIA in devising the plan for the capture and execution of Che Guevara, the doctor had so far managed to avoid attracting notice, or, indeed, capture.

He was just a German emigrant in a small town, working at the clinic, and if his methodology was occasionally odd and his interest in births – particularly of twins – sometimes disturbing, nevertheless he was a doctor, and as such was both respected and valued by the local community.

The men who were currently standing over him with guns in their hands, however, valued him for a different reason, and respected him not at all.

“We’ve been watching you,
Herr Doktor
, for a good long while,” the one on the left said. He was dark skinned and bearded, and wore loose army fatigues that bore no insignia. “We know what goes on in the lab in the forest, and we know what happens to the babies who don’t make it. And to the ones who do…”

“I am an innocent…” the doctor began, but the man cut him off. The one on the right, not speaking, slapped him. He wore thick rings on his hand, and the back-handed blow drew blood.

“You are innocent of nothing,” he said. “Now. Let us go. Work, after all, makes us free, does it not, doctor?”

Arbeit macht frei
. It was the sign that hung on the gates of the camp that he had worked in. But that had been during the war.

“Work for us, and we will let you live,” the bearded man said.

The doctor shrugged, and got up, and wiped the blood from his mouth. He had not survived this long, first in Germany and then in the post-war years, without knowing when to follow an order.

“I am at your service,” he said, and smiled ironically. “Comrade.”

3

The hands were gruesome things, cut off at the wrists – he couldn’t see what had prompted anyone to do it. The job had been done professionally, but messily, by a local doctor in a town called Vallegrande. It had taken the man several tries before he had severed the hands clean off from the rest of the body.

They had taken a jeep and driven deep into the forest. He was no longer surprised. They knew where his second, secret, lab was. They knew everything. South America was crawling with these Marxist terrorists, but then it had enough of everything else, too, including his kind. More than one former colleague had made his way to South America after the war with new papers and sometimes a new face. So he shrugged and got on with it.